


To keep the Goddess on my side she demands a sacrifice

by zoenicole89



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 11:08:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4389455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoenicole89/pseuds/zoenicole89
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate wants to cry, wants to sob at the fact that her parents are dead, her brother is a vampire, she’s all alone in the world now, and the world just wants to kill her. There is a gaping pit in her chest where she thinks her heart is supposed to be, but all she can feel is the crushing weight of hopelessness.</p><p>But Santanico isn’t done yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Kate is looking up from underneath her eyelashes, looking through tendrils of soft brown hair falling into her field of vision. Santanico is smiling at her, a sensual grin that makes Kate’s cheeks blush a faint pink and pulls her gaze down. She bites at her bottom lip, worrying it in between her teeth.

“Kate.”

The way Santanico says it is like a prayer – some sort of blessing. She is an ages old culebra, the 500-year-old Queen of the temple the Titty Twister is built on top of, and she’s saying this seventeen-year-old girl’s name like it holds freedom for her.

“Yes?” Kate stutters over the word, hitching at the start and lingering over the end. She’s lost all her ability to talk coherently. She wants to blame the heat of the room, the fact that she hasn’t eaten anything since the morning, because she doesn’t want to admit to herself the desire she feels for Santanico.

“Come here,” Santanico says it softly, sweetly, extending one slender arm towards Kate, curling a finger impossibly seductively into her clenched fist.

Kate wants to go to her. She wants to crawl towards Santanico and tuck herself into the embrace of this powerful woman who has deemed her worthy enough to notice, worthy enough to want as well.

She almost does it. Santanico is so appealing, with her dark eyes and warm skin, her lips shining a deep dark red. But something snaps in her mind, breaking through the haze this room and Santanico’s presence has pushed over her mind. 

“Why?” she manages to croak out. But even though her voice is cracked and dry, the word holds power. Santanico sways a little, looking surprised that someone as average as Kate could break her spell.

“Why are they trying to sacrifice me?” Kate doesn’t know whether she means Sex Machine or the other culebras deep in the bowels of the temple, but what she does know is that she has been tied to an altar twice today, ready to be sacrificed to the false gods that Santanico and her kind worship, and if anyone knows why this is happening to her it would be Santanico.

“Oh, my darling,” Santanico smiles sadly. “I want to be free. But the gods demand a sacrifice. For me to be free, truly free, I must be replaced.”

Kate wants to cry, wants to sob at the fact that her parents are dead, her brother is a vampire, she’s all alone in the world now, and the world just wants to kill her. There is a gaping pit in her chest where she thinks her heart is supposed to be, but all she can feel is the crushing weight of hopelessness.

But Santanico isn’t done speaking yet. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this. You’re everything I used to be: innocent, young, naïve. I can tell that you see the best in people. I used to do that.” 

Kate can tell that Santanico means it. There is so much sadness in her eyes, and she’s pulled Kate over to her on the bed and is stroking her hair, soothing her. Santanico doesn’t want to sacrifice anyone else to the life that she has had to live – she’s only doing it because she feels like she has no choice.

“I need to be free. If I don’t give you to the Nine Lords I will never be free. They will hunt me to the ends of the Earth and drag me back here and then I will never know freedom.” 

The conviction with which Santanico speaks is frightening. She stands up now, pulling Kate off the bed and guiding her across the ancient stone floor to an altar in the center of it.

Kate follows helplessly, allowing herself to be picked up by Santanico and laid down on the altar. She can feel the cold stone against her back, hard and uninviting.

“Why does it have to be me?” Kate hears herself asking, and she is ashamed of herself when she follows it with: “Can’t you give the Lords someone else?”

“Kate.” The word burns her skin, sending heat coursing through her. “It has to be you. Do you think it was coincidence that my temple has been turned into a club of debauchery and sin? The one to replace me must have as pure a soul as I did when I was sacrificed. It’s hard to find someone like that in a place like this.”

Kate’s face crumples and she begins to sob again. She knows that she should try and fight, but what’s the point? Why should she even try to survive? There’s nothing left for her. 

So she cries and lets Santanico wrap coarse rope around her wrists and ankles.

One of Santanico’s hands reaches forward and smooths fine strands of hair off of Kate’s face, before she strokes down it with her cool, dry fingers. “You’re perfect,” Santanico muses, so quietly she must be talking to herself, letting her fingers trace along her jaw and then up to the shell of ear, pulling more hair behind it and off of Kate’s face.

She leans in then, and Kate feels a sharp pinch against her neck, and then an absolutely transcendental and erotic sensation flowing through her. This is the sweetest oblivion she has ever known, and Kate feels as though she’s died and gone to heaven.

Kate finally feels at peace and ready to accept her death so that Santanico can be free at last. Except – something happens. There’s something happening in the world beyond her, there’s an awareness trying to edge into the oblivion that is her mind right now. Slowly, oh so slowly, Kate pulls her soul back into her body. 

She feels first. She can feel that Santanico is no longer at her neck. The loss of her teeth digging into her soft flesh has pulled her out of her bliss and she knows she should be glad that she isn’t dying, but all she wants is to feel at peace again.

Next comes her hearing. She can hear gunshots, and male voices yelling. At first they’re hazy, but one slides into focus with “Get away from her, you fucking snake!”

And then all at once Kate is back in her own body again. She’s out from whatever spell Santanico’s bite had put her under. At first she can only see red fabric hanging from the ceiling above her, but then she turns her head. Seth and Richie Gecko are standing at the other end of the room, Seth’s gun pointing at a spot above her that she thinks must be where Santanico is. Richie looks lost and confused, and Kate can see that he doesn’t have his glasses on.

Turning her head back around she can see Santanico again. But it isn’t really her. Her face has changed, her smooth tan skin shifted into scaly ridges. Kate doesn’t feel the revulsion that she once would have felt at looking upon Santanico’s true face. Feeling like the world is moving through molasses Kate watches Santanico’s beautiful reptilian face pull back into a snarl, before her whole head snaps back and her shoulders slump over as her body falls back onto the cold, unforgiving stone floor.

Kate can’t do anything except stare, confused. She can’t see the floor, and she can’t move to get up, belatedly realizing that she is still bound to the altar where Santanico had meant to sacrifice her. She can hear Seth saying something behind her, but she can’t make out any of the words. Her ears are ringing and her vision has started to go blurry and she can feel her warm blood still oozing out of her neck.

Maybe this is the end.  
 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate slept for three days before waking up.

It isn’t until three days later that Kate fully understands what happened in the temple. Her memories of what happened with Santanico are hazy and half-remembered, like a dream.

It was right after she killed her father, and she and Freddie had been together, trying to escape from the temple and all its mind-fucking. She remembers rounding a corner and seeing a door, and pushing the door open hoping for an exit. It wasn’t an exit she had found, but what looked to be Santanico’s private rooms within the temple. That was where her memory went hazy.

Seth said that he and Richie had been in the Labyrinth. The Mind Fuck of all mind fucks in the temple is what it sounded like. The brothers had made it through the Labyrinth and Seth had been trying to find a way out when they had stumbled on the _sasak ukib_ – the serpent that contained Santanico’s blood – just another step towards her gaining her freedom. Richie still refused to talk about it, but Seth had told her that Richie ate the snake, which seemed to lead Richie right to Santanico – and therefore her.

Seth was the one who had shot Santanico in the forehead, incapacitating her, but Richie had been the one to stab her in the heart, reducing her to dust and ending her life.

( _“She made me kill the bank teller – Monica. She was a person with a family and Santanico made me take that away from her just so I could_ see _better. She turned me into a monster who has to drink blood to live. And she tried to kill Kate, who has the purest soul I’ve ever seen. How could I love someone like that?” Richie says, the wooden stake still trembling from the force he had used to thrust it into Santanico’s undead heart.)_

After her body had crumpled into dust, the snake had forced itself out of Richie’s body, returning to its mistresses ashes before it, too, disintegrated.

From what Seth has told her, it sounds like he carried her body out of the temple while Richie trailed listlessly behind. No one had tried to stop them, and none of them know whether they should be scared of being followed. He said that once they got to a motel Richie had seemed to snap out of his grief, taking charge on what to do with Kate.

_(“She needs to heal. Santanico took her blood but didn’t give her any venom. That’s how I knew she was going to kill her,” Richie says – last sentence almost an afterthought – looking at Kate’s spread out form on the room’s single king bed._

_“What do we do?” asks Seth, looking in despair on the girl whose life he and his brother had ruined._

_“Nothing. We let her sleep,” says a stone-faced Richie.)_

Kate slept for three days before waking up. She listens as Seth tells her what happened, asks her what they can do for her. Richie sits in a chair in the corner, glasses still missing, staring straight ahead and refusing to look at her or Seth.

She knows what he’s feeling. Santanico had so much power, and she used all of it to try and get what she wanted. Kate knows now that she never loved Richie – he was only a means to her freedom. The Gecko brothers were at the Titty Twister that night for the same reason as Kate and her family. Richie and Kate both had something Santanico needed to be free. Even still, Kate finds it hard to be mad at the now dead culebra Queen. She had been a slave for 500 years and she just wanted to be free. Kate knows that there is a lot a person will do for a chance at freedom.

Now Kate feels mostly empty. She looks back at Seth and says “I need to take a bath,” and slips into the motel bathroom before he can respond.

It’s a while later when Kate hears Seth call her name from the other side of the bathroom door, his knuckle rapping against the cheap wood steadily. “Are you ok in there?” he calls. “It’s been an hour.”

Kate feels a sense of surprise at his words, not having realized that so much time had passed since she left the Gecko brothers in the other room. She shivers as her fingers find the two small scabs on the side of her neck and stroke them.

“I’m here,” she says, just loud enough for Seth to hear through the door.

“Are you okay?” Seth calls back, and Kate can hear the concern evident in his voice, she just can’t bring herself to care. She doesn’t know how to answer. She’s not okay, there’s no way she can ever be okay again. The only part of her experience that stands out to her is the brief (too brief) time when Santanico had been on her neck, pulling her blood and her life out of her body. The most pleasure she had ever felt in her short life had been when she was dying, and she felt like an addict now. How was she supposed to live knowing what it felt like to die?

“I think I want to die,” Kate whispers, as she slides down in the tub and lowers her head underneath the water. She thinks back to right before she had passed out in the temple and wonders if she was right.

Maybe this is the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boom here's a little (kinda depressing epilogue)

**Author's Note:**

> Yay second story!! Hopefully this will tide some of you over until next month when we get season 2!


End file.
